Until late last week, if you wanted to use the potentially cable-TV-replacing video streaming service Joost, you had to have friends. But now anybody can watch Joost online from dusk until the dawn and beyond, because Beta 1.0 of the P2P (peer-to-peer) video service just hit the streets. The good news? The company’s just about gotten it right after umpteen betas, and it’s looking good. However, it remains to be seen whether Joost techies have figured out how to scale the network without crashing it. Hey, let’s all pounce on it and see if it holds up! Take a look at a screen shot and our impressions, after the jump.
Transformers get a dedicated Joost channel showing eps from the original series. [Tech Digest]
Internet TV software Joost doesn’t want to lose any positions in the infinite video wars. They want to move out of the PC box as soon as possible and that’s why they are getting ready to embed their software in TV sets with Internet connections, cellphones, set-top boxes and any other “future device” they could get their hands on.
Have you missed the Joost train because you don’t have any friends and are still scrambling for an invite? Fear not, the guys over at GigaOM and NewTeeVee are partnering with Joost to dole out 20,000 invites. All you have to do is signup with a name and email address.
Oh, and pass the “I’m a human” challenge/response test, which most of you should get past. We hope. – Matt Buchanan
Invite Form [Joost via GigaOM]
A new report by Forrester Research declares that the paid video download market is going to come to a grinding halt in 2008, despite growing rapidly into 2007. Why? Forrester analyst James McQuivey thinks we’re going to withhold our credit card numbers and migrate to free content—besides, according to McQuivey, despite Apple’s best efforts to make it easy for all, it’s only us “media addicts” who’ve jumped in.
The shaky manifesto wavers a bit into believability, however, when he says that the current geek-heaviness owes to “the average consumer still being confused about different video formats and DRM rights, getting downloaded video onto the TV, and premium content being slow to arrive to the digital market.” On that much, he’s right.
But is that enough to reason to think paid downloads are doomed to imminent oblivion in the wake of say, Joost? Or a subscription service attached to your 360 or Apple TV? As Ars points out, people occasionally do like to own the content they watch. You know, sometimes. And the market’s still in its relative infancy, with potentially lots of room to grow into the proper niches to fit users’ tastes.
Have guys paid for a video download? From who? – Matt Buchanan
Forrester: Paid video downloads, Apple TV a “dead end” [Ars Technica] Image via Flickr
Well, do it yourself, you lazy bum! GigaOM and NewTeeVee are offering up self-invitations to the new Joost service that is taking the Intertubes by storm! I personally haven’t played around with Joost that much, but from what I have done it is an alright service. Let’s just hope they have added some servers to handle the load of beta users. –Travis Hudson
Free Invites! [Joost]
Joost recently opened itself up to an unlimited beta, and its since been inundated with new users as websites hand out stacks upon stacks of invites. The video streaming service is based on a peer-to-peer bandwidth sharing structure, so in theory it should be able to scale to however many users hop on board. In reality? Eh… not so much.
The service has been hit hard by the thousands upon thousands of new users who have joined up in the past week, and some have been unable to access the programming. Even though it’s a peer-to-peer system, there are still servers that people need to be routed through, and apparently there just aren’t enough of them out there. When asked about the performance issues, CEO Fredrik de Wahl said “It’s stumbling a bit, whereas we’d like it to be sprinting.”
It’s cool, bro. You’re still in beta. But while you’re adding more servers do you want to go ahead and add some decent content while you’re at it? Thanks. –Adam Frucci
Informitiv [via Broadband Reports]
Today marks the first day of YouTube competitor Joost’s commercial availability. That’s right, it’s out of “expanded beta” and open to an “unlimited number”—cue record scratch noise—”of friends, family and colleagues of existing beta testers.” Maybe it’s not beta, or expanded beta, but I am going to call this interim period “expanded expanded beta.”
The dudes who brought you KaZaA and Skype also announced new content for the “TV anywhere” service, including Hasbro, the NHL, Sports Illustrated (that’s the one with the ladies rolling in sand, right?), Sony Pictures Television, CNN and our favorite, Adult Swim. (Carl is so dreamy!)
